Bruce Temkin's Blog

In preparation for my speeches in London and Stockholm, I examined the responses from our Q4 2009 customer experience survey of executives which was the basis for my research on North American companies called The State Of Customer Experience, 2010.

It turned out that there were 53 responses from Western European firms with annual income of at least $150 million. While this was not a large enough sample size for me to publish in a research report, it was certainly interesting enough for me to present during my speeches. So I thought I’d share some of the data here.

First of all, there’s definitely a lot of interest in customer experience in Europe. Forty-seven of the respondents said that customer experience was either critical or very important to their firm’s 2010 strategy and, as you can see below, three-quarters of the respondents said that there company is trying to differentiate itself with customer experience.

Only 6% of the respondents said that they had a very disciplined approach to customer experience management. Here’s what they identified as major obstacles for improving customer experience:

It’s great work! Here’s a graphic from his post that shows how customer experience leaders outperform customer experience laggards in the stock market. His analysis used the results from our 2007 CxPi.

My take: Picoult’s work complements my findings from research called customer experience boosts revenue in which I analyzed last year’s CxPi. Here’s the difference in loyalty that I found between companies in the top quartile of customer experience (when measured against industry averages) and the companies in the lowest quartile:

Barnes & Noble took the top spot for the second year in a row. Marriot Hotels, Hampton Inn, Amazon.com, and Holiday Inn Express round out the top 5. At the other end of the spectrum, Charter Communications landed at the bottom for the third year in a row. Here are the full rankings:

Today was a great day in New York; the first day of our Customer Experience Forum. The Grand Hyatt was rocking as we had about 700 people on site. I had a fun time with my opening keynote speech -- combining customer experience and the Wizard Of Oz. Hopefully people enjoyed it. I'll be posting more about my speech on my personal blog.

At the end of the day, I announced the winners of Forrester's first ever Voice Of The Customer (VoC) Award. So, let me say congratulations to our three winners: Experian, Progressive, Vanguard. They all actively collected feedback and put that information to use, showing significant benefits. Here are the nomination forms from the winners. They're worth downloading!

As you may (or may not) be aware, we just closed the nomination period for Forrester's first ever Voice Of The Customer (VoC) Award. So I'm now in the process of grading the submissions with a couple of other analysts. It won't be an easy process, because we received more than 35 excellent nominations. I'll be announcing the winner on the first day of our Customer Experience Forum in New York next month.